Wednesday, February 18, 2009

OPERA BROWSING

Things have been blogged down here for a while. The switch from PC to Apple was smooth enough, and all the angst about lost bookmarks, emails, and years of favorite things amounted to little. There are ways to import, and for the rest, well, it is a little like clothes: if you haven't worn something in the last 12 months, 4 seasons, then you're not going to wear it again. Clear the cupboards. Exceptions apply, but you get the picture.

So the new browser was Safari. Apart from a clunky bookmark menu, which I took as some sort of lesson in old-dog-new-tricks, all seemed well. But (never start a sentence with but, although better to start than finish with one), however, Safari and Blogger.com are all but incompatible. The show-stopper is you can't copy and paste into you Blogger post window using Safari. It pastes outside the window.

As a juvenile and non-pro blogger, I had chosen Blogger because it was free, easy, looked reasonable enough, and seemed widely used in blogs I cruised. Oh, and as hosted by Google, you-tube was easy peasy to post. So, let's get another browser. Enter Firefox.

Firefox was fine, for a while, until the latest upgrade. I think it was then. You know how you always relate something that has been creeping up on you to an event, a memory flag, like Dad was fine till his last anaesthetic, then his memory has never been the same, in fact his brain has been damaged, when in fact Dad had been deteriorating for years, but blame saves introspection.

So, creeping up on me, or maybe since the last update, Firefox took great delight in throwing up the spinning rainbow wheel, the wheel of misfortune, ever more frequently, till typing a single letter, let alone a search, would send it off. It's unusable.

This is a browser I downloaded yesterday. Early days. But, sorry, however, there are some immediately obvious good features: speed dial, quick find, opera link (it displays Safari bookmarks with considerable more nous than Safari), and so far seems satisfactory, let's say manageable, with Blogger.